matt had a similarly negative experience when LW was redesigned a little while ago.
That circumstance is somewhat different in nature. While as far as I know nobody wanted matt to experience negative affect the discouragement of ‘effort’ was actually a perceived instrumental good, given an expectation that more effort would produce undesired outcomes.
I note that this relies on beliefs at the time. In that context users had to make the prediction “If a website administrator implements detrimental changes when previous discussion had already explained why such a thing was not desired and a prediction had been made that a change to the website would probably be bad, what is the probability that future ‘effort’ will be beneficial?” The answer is very, very low. The emotional distress matt experience was his social instincts warning him that interfering with the tribe when they do not want you to is a dangerous act—especially when that interference is to (in effect) institute a prohibition against something they could previously do.
It turns out, however, that matt is a superior human being to the typical person in his role. While his ego did cause him to act more defensive than optimal and seemed to cause him to experience emotional distress it did not cripple his ability to respond to user feedback or cause him to lash out with actions against the users as many would. The undesired change was eventually fixed, as were the few bugs that were introduced.
I expect users to drastically update how they would respond to matt if he made future website upgrades due to having more information about matt. He definitely deserves a lot of rewarding for going ahead and doing the bugfixes and implementing ‘retraction then deletion’ despite having received discouragement. He lives (here) in Melbourne. Perhaps I should give him a packet of M&Ms if I run in to him at one of our meetups!
That circumstance is somewhat different in nature. While as far as I know nobody wanted matt to experience negative affect the discouragement of ‘effort’ was actually a perceived instrumental good, given an expectation that more effort would produce undesired outcomes.
I note that this relies on beliefs at the time. In that context users had to make the prediction “If a website administrator implements detrimental changes when previous discussion had already explained why such a thing was not desired and a prediction had been made that a change to the website would probably be bad, what is the probability that future ‘effort’ will be beneficial?” The answer is very, very low. The emotional distress matt experience was his social instincts warning him that interfering with the tribe when they do not want you to is a dangerous act—especially when that interference is to (in effect) institute a prohibition against something they could previously do.
It turns out, however, that matt is a superior human being to the typical person in his role. While his ego did cause him to act more defensive than optimal and seemed to cause him to experience emotional distress it did not cripple his ability to respond to user feedback or cause him to lash out with actions against the users as many would. The undesired change was eventually fixed, as were the few bugs that were introduced.
I expect users to drastically update how they would respond to matt if he made future website upgrades due to having more information about matt. He definitely deserves a lot of rewarding for going ahead and doing the bugfixes and implementing ‘retraction then deletion’ despite having received discouragement. He lives (here) in Melbourne. Perhaps I should give him a packet of M&Ms if I run in to him at one of our meetups!